Question 1:Why did your DECO clients get special deals from the city?

What's Doug Ford's record?

In 2016 Doug Ford was found guilty by the City of Toronto's integrity commissioner for using his elected position for personal gain. Had Ford still been in office, the likely penalty would have been a loss of salary or expulsion.

​In August 2012 Doug Ford (and his brother) intervened when one of their Deco Labels & Tags clients was facing a fine for dumping sewage into a North York river:

​"Mayor Rob Ford and Councillor Doug Ford summoned the highest levels of the city’s bureaucracy to a meeting after they learned a Toronto company that has done business with their family firm was the prime suspect in a sewage spill investigation, newly released records show. In a series of after-hours e-mails and phone calls from Aug. 14, 2012, Mayor Ford and his staffers, along with a staffer for Councillor Ford, contacted Toronto’s top managers – including city manager Joe Pennachetti, deputy manager John Livey, as well as the head of Toronto Water, Lou Di Gironimo – after bylaw inspectors descended on Apollo Health and Beauty Care, a manufacturer of soaps and shampoos. The Ford family business, Deco Labels and Tags, has manufactured labels for Apollo’s products. None of the senior bureaucrats were made aware that Apollo has contracted Deco Labels and Tags to make their labels, city officials said in interviews. On Aug. 15, three senior Toronto bureaucrats – Mr. Livey, Mr. Di Gironimo and Joanne Di Caro, the head of the division that responds to environmental spills – met with Apollo’s chairman, Richard Wachsberg, along with Mayor Ford, Doug Ford and the city inspector who first traced the spill back to the company, records show. The North York factory is not in Councillor Ford’s ward.""Since the spill and the meeting, Apollo has co-operated extensively with the city to improve how it treats its discharge and is participating in a compliance program, Mr. Di Gironimo said. He stressed that city officials want to work with businesses, especially new businesses, so that they can comply with the city’s sewer bylaws rather than have staff automatically take an adversarial approach to policing the sewers. Apollo has not been fined."

Why does it matter?

Want a good definition of gravy? How about tying up the mayor's office, a councillor's office, the city's top bureaucrat and several senior civil servants to to handle a minor issue that could have been resolved at a much lower level and with far fewer people. How many thousands of dollars of staffer time was wasted on this exercise? And why was Councillor Doug Ford's (Ward 2) office involved when Apollo's operations are in Councillor Anthony Perruzza's district (Ward 8)? Didn't Doug have his own constituents to look after?​

This is a textbook definition of conflict of interest. Did did Rob or Doug not have time to bother telling anyone that they had a personal financial stake in Apollo's operations? How many similar activities has Doug undertaken for companies outside his ward that aren't business customers of his private company?

If Doug is willing to do this for small stakes at a municipal level, how's he going to act when he's running the entire province?